By owning, operating network, Marines set the table for the JIE

Brig. Gen. Kevin Nally, Marines Corps CIO

The Navy-Marine Corps Intranet is no more as far as the Marine Corps is
concerned.

The service has moved on to a new government owned, government operated network,
called Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN).

"It's an awesome accomplishment by the people who work for me. We don't even use
the term NMCI anymore," said Brig. Gen. Kevin Nally, the chief information officer
of
the Marine Corps. "We didn't see any difference in transition. It's going really,
really well. I have no complaints."

The Marine Corps officially made the transition June 1 to the MCEN, and now
eight months later, the final pieces are coming together.

Nally said the goal of MCEN is to ensure the network serves all Marines equally.

"One of the big things that we've done is we've gotten away from 1-800-HELP-ME if
you have computer problems. We have a regionalized help desk environment, which
means local units at base, posts and stations call their cyber folks first and say
'I need help.' You can put a face to the help," he said. "If that individual,
Marine or civilian, can't fix it, it gets elevated up to the next echelon. I've
been traveling a little bit since the budget works, if you will, the Marines are
telling me they really like this regionalized help desk approach."

Nally said it makes the help desk more personal, and keeps Marines in control of
their network to get issues resolved more quickly.

Nally said MCEN will help consolidate five major unclassified networks into one to
give the service better security, more efficiency and less labor needed for
upkeep.

"It's basically the work we will do over the next couple of years to collapse the
five major networks into one. We will roll out Multiprotocol Label Switching
(MPLS) this summer so that buy has been done and we are working the engineering
piece for that and we are big players in JIE," he said. "MPLS will replace the
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) routers because they are end of life. That's one
of ways ahead to better secure your network, and DISA is using them and continues
to roll them out."

Nally said his staff is going to bases, posts and stations to finalize the
architecture part of the network consolidation effort. Part of that effort, he
said, is updating the hardware that runs the networks, which the Marines bought
back from Hewlett-Packard, which runs NMCI.

The new network is part of the way the Marine Corps taking part in the Joint
Information Environment (JIE) across all of the Defense Department.

"It's going to be a network built on standards, identity access management piece,
single security architecture, a joint regional security stacks that will be part
of the bases, posts and stations and you will plug into that," he said. "Part of
the JIE effort is to collapse networks and data centers. All of this is working
toward that end state of the JIE-reducing the IT footprint and making it more
secure."

Another part of the JIE is using common services or at least connecting to
enterprisewide services, such as email.

DoD CIO Teri Takai required all the services to provide a plan for migrating to
enterprise email provided by DISA.

Nally said the Marine Corps met the goal of the plan earlier this month by
creating an enterprise-level address book that interfaces with an authoritative
index of all DoD personnel, housed at the Defense Manpower Data Center.

"We now have a global address list where I can find everyone's name who has a DoD
or Office of Secretary of Defense email account. That includes I can find people
who are using DISA enterprise email, people in the Navy or Marine Corps who
aren't on DISA email and I can find civilians and contractors. We've met that
requirement," he said. "It took efforts from my staff, Marine Corps operations
security center and DISA, which was a huge help and big players, we were able to
pull it all together."

The Department of Navy also is leading an effort to develop a business case to compare the costs of DISA
email to what they have now.

Nally said the business case analysis should be done in May and then the DoN will
have a better idea of where to go next.

Network updates and the JIE aren't the only priorities Nally has been focusing on
over the last few years.

His top priority continues to be to get the warfighter the best tools and
technologies possible, especially when they are in theater.